EPOS: Sharing a till drawer

Although it is useful for a shop to have more than one till, is it possible for a number of tills to share a common till drawer?

At a very basic level, of course! If you make it very simple, and use a single till drawer with a key to unlock it, as many tills as you like can use it. The problems come when you want multiple tills to actually trigger the opening mechanism of the till drawer, and when you want to cash up.

Most retail till drawers are opened by the EPOS software sending a signal to the receipt printer - this then kicks open the till drawer. Many EPOS software packages can be configured to say which printer they are using by setting a particular LPT port. On modern PCS it is possible to use the NET USE command to re direct a particular LPT port to a printer which is shared on another computer.

Therefore, on the till where the cash drawer is actually attached the receipt printer is shared, and on the additional till, the LPT port is redirected to this shared printer.

When the additional till sends a kick command to the LPT port, it gets redirected to the shared printer, and that kicks the till open.

Of course, you also need to combine the cashing up. Usually each till is in command of its own cashing up. If all the cash is in one till, this is difficult! However, many epos software solutions allow you to either cash up a whole branch in one go, or they allow two different tills to have the same till reference, and the cashing up is performed by till reference - in effect, as far as the computer is concerned, both tills are actually the same.

This all relies on your EPOS software allowing this type of configuration, so talk to your EPOS system solution provider for more information.